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Brackets Sprint 22 adds word wrap and community commits

Brackets Sprint 22 has word wrap enabled by default

Build 22 of Adobe's open source code editor Brackets, also known as "Brackets Sprint 22", adds word wrap and several user interface improvements. The extension management has also been reworked, making it significantly easier for users to install plugins for the editor.

Brackets is a code editor designed for web development that was started by Adobe as an open source project last year. Designed for writing HTML, JavaScript and CSS code, the software is built using these same technologies, which enables developers using the program to improve it if they wish. Brackets is small (just over 30MB) and can connect directly to Google's Chrome browser to provide a live preview of CSS code as it is edited. HTML and JavaScript changes are currently only refreshed when the files in question are saved.

In an important milestone for any open source project wanting to build up a community, the developers also accepted their first code contributions from the community, including a number of bug fixes, code clean ups, translations and a number of smaller features such as the ability for the editor to remember when a user changes its font size.

This latest version of the editor has word wrap enabled by default (it can be turned off in the "View" menu) and also highlights the current line in the editor window if users wish to enable that function. Line numbers can now be hidden and keyboard shortcuts for scrolling and navigating between words have been improved. Users can also enable a function that automatically adds closing brackets and parentheses, a feature that can be found in the "Edit" menu and is labelled "auto close braces" – "auto close brackets" could have been mistaken, considering the software's name.

To install extensions in Brackets 22, users now point the editor to a URL containing a ZIP archive or GitHub repository of the extension, instead of manually copying files to the Brackets folder. Live preview in Chrome has also been improved and is now more reliable, according to the Brackets developers. A list of all new features in Brackets Sprint 22 is available from the Brackets site where users can also download the application.

Brackets Sprint 22 is available for Windows and Mac OS X and its MIT-licensed source code is available on GitHub. The developers say that they are planning to release new features for the editor "about every 2½ weeks"; users of the editor will be alerted of updates by an icon of a present in the user interface.